Sunday, November 09, 2014

Practice Journal: 3 November 2014

Last week I was sick so I gave playing a rest. The week before I wasn't that diligent with the note taking but now I'm back into it. Although my notes were a bit thin on detail earlier in the week, I tried to make sense of them as I wrote them up.

Monday:
Terrace Dynamics
Overtones
Todays lesson - find a better time to practice (not 25 minutes before your wife has a conference call!), the horn was too loud but I could work on rhythm, so I tapped out some patterns in Pure Rhythm.

Wednesday:
Spent about 15mins on each of the below.
Letting It Fall and Overtones
Modus Vetus - sing and play 1 phrase in all keys. I noticed that my singing this week was a bit rough. Sstill feeling the effects of last weeks cold, I lost a bit of the higher range. It got better as the week progressed.
Etude - Balkan piece. Not exactly sure of the origin of this tune but it was given to me by Hayden Chisholm in Greece. I hadn't working on this for quite some time but it just popped into my mind so I decided to have a crack at it again.
Improvisation - playing 5 and 7 note phrases

Thursday:
Rascher's Top Tones - playing through page 12.
Modus Vetus - sing and play 1 phrase in each key.
Balkan piece - breaking it down a phrase at a time.

Friday:
Long tones (F's and C's)
Letting It Fall.
Overtones and Rasher (parts of page 13).
Modus Novas - sing and play - it's been a while and I was rusty.
Modus Vetus - the tonal stuff came together better
Balkan Piece.
Improv - short phrases. To avoid compulsive playing I would put the horn down briefly after blowing a few phrases. I found it a nice way to stay relaxed and to reflect on what I had just played before moving on.

Saturday:
Held some long tones - used a tuner. Not something I do that often (I prefer playing against a note/drone). But I might stick with this a bit to see what happens.
Letting It Fall
Rasher book - about half of page 14.
Modus Vetus - sing and play 1 phrase in all keys (descending chromatically).
Balkan Piece - working through it slowly. Having bit of a hard to memorising it.
Improv - similar to above (shorter phrases, trying to avoid compulsive playing and then let longer phrases and more dense playing develop from there).

Sunday:
Today I worked on rhythm in between each of the below. Working on the the Ewe bell patterns from Pure Rhythm (playing them on bongos). Working on the first rhythm and then the 1st variation in which the quarter note pulse shifts to the middle triplet (trying not to turn the beat over!).
Long Tones with Tuner.
Letting It Fall and tone matching
Rascher book - first half of page 14.
Modus Vetus - sing and play 1 phrase in all keys (descending chromatically).
Modus Novas - sing and play 1 phrase (ascending chromatically). My focus started to drift after working through about 4 keys. So I moved on to something more casual - listening and at times playing along with the Agios Lavrentios Brass Band video from this years Music Village.
Finished things of with some improvising.

I haven't recorded myself practicing for a while so I adding that to the list.